1. Technical Field
The invention relates to data mining. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for retail data mining using pair-wise co-occurrence consistency.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Retail leaders recognize today that the greatest opportunity for innovation lies at the interface between the store and the customer. The retailer owns vital marketing information on the purchases of millions of customers: information that can be used to transform the store from a fancy warehouse where the customer is a mere stock picker into a destination where customers go because of the value the store gives them. The opportunity is enormous: seventy to eighty percent of buying choices are made at the point of purchase, and smart retailers can influence the choices to maximize economic value and customer satisfaction. Because the retailer is closest to the consumer, he has the unique opportunity and power to create loyalty, encourage repeat purchase behavior and establish high value purchase career paths. However, to optimize the customer interface in this fashion, retailers must be extremely sophisticated with analysis of their purchase data. The sheer volume of purchase data, while offering unprecedented opportunities for such customer centric retailing, also challenges the traditional statistical and mathematical techniques at the retailer's disposal. Retail data analysts frequently find it difficult, if not impossible, to derive concrete, actionable decisions from such data. Most traditional retailers use only limited OLAP capabilities to slice and dice the transaction data to extract basic statistical reports and use them and other domain knowledge to make marketing decisions. Only in the last few years have traditional retailers started warming up to segmentation, product affinity analysis, and recommendation engine technologies to make business decisions. Traditional computational frameworks, such as classification and regression, seek optimal mappings between a set of input features that either cause or correlate-with a target variable. It would be advantageous to provide improved approaches to retail data mining.